Candidates Tournament 2020 - A Preview

The Candidates Tournament is my favourite one. It's not just another super-strong round-robin, here everything is at stake and the pressure is sky high. The players try to rise to their best and show what they are capable of when it matters most.

I wanted to write this preview for quite some time but then life happened - the world suffered a huge disruption and other things became more important than chess. Even more so, I wasn't even sure the tournament will take place.

Now we can see that the tournament will start. Will it finish? Nobody knows. The whole atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, increased tension (as it wasn't enough) makes me much less enthusiastic about it. That includes writing this preview.

There are so many unknowns. How will the world situation affect the players (it's already known how it affected two of them - Radjabov withdrew, Wang Hao publicly said he would rather not be there), will they think of their families in Paris or China, what if they receive news that one of them got sick, how will they handle the new situation, what if somebody gets sick in the hotel, what if one of the players gets sick, what if one or more of the players start coughing and sneezing (deliberately or not)...?

If it were up to me, I would have erred on the side of caution. When I play chess I want to be at peace. Botvinnik couldn't play without inner peace. And what inner peace are we talking about when the whole world is in turmoil? Why even put the players in such a situation, to play under those conditions? Even if you can isolate the tournament hall, you cannot isolate the people as long as they live on this planet.

So this preview is not going to be the same as the previous ones (Moscow 2016 and Berlin 2018), which I must admit I loved writing. This time I will limit myself to some observations about the players and what I think is interesting about them.

I won't be very original in saying that I think that the winner be either Caruana or Ding Liren. They are a bit higher than the rest in class.

Please continue reading the analysis of the players here.